There’s a diary on DailyKos that everyone needs to read. The diary describes a meeting of the county election commission in Wautaga County, NC — home of Boone, NC, and Appalachian State University.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/…
It seems the local Republican-dominated election commission met to plan how to implement the legislation passed by the Republican-dominated NC legislature that is aimed at suppressing voting by college students and other typical Democratic constituencies.
The diary includes an hour-long video of a meeting that quickly exploded in shouting matches, led by local Democrats who aren’t taking this stuff lying down.
Here, for example, is a list of what the Tea Party members of the county election commission wanted to accomplish:
There’s a lot of local backstory associated with this story, but the short and skinny is that these two meathead Republican Board members came to the meeting with a prepared-but clearly-not-by-them Tea Party agenda to:
1. Eliminate the Appalachian State University (ASU) early one-stop voting site.
2. Force all early voting into one location hard to access by students, faculty, and staff at ASU.
3. Outlaw any verbal public comment at Board meetings and require that written comments be screened to ensure they were “pertinent” and communicated without cussing or libel.
4. Require that the 27-year Elections Board Director, a woman totally on the straight up and beloved by the entire county, not be allowed to meet with anyone in her office without supervision.
5. Mandate that anyone calling into the local BOE office have their names recorded.
6. Move the “New River” precinct (a heavily populated precinct in and around the town of Boone) out into the very corner of the precinct into a virtually unknown location and as far away from municipal voters as possible.
7. Combine three Boone precincts into one Super Precinct consisting of 9,300 voters and 35 parking spaces. Oh. And away as far as possible from ASU.
Please don’t tell me it can’t happen here. That’s what folks in NC thought a couple of years ago.